BRUNO WEBER

BRUNO WEBER1931-2011 | SWITZERLAND

Bruno Weber

Bruno Weber was born in 1931 in Dietikon, Switzerland, and grew up in a large Baroque house which, he recalled, had “many mysterious rooms [which] had never really been explored”. The experience, he said, made a lasting impression on his imagination.At the age of 12 he began painting with oil colours. In 1947, he completed college in Zürich under Johannes Itten. In that moment he thought that he was only a painter. Afterwards he began training until 1949 as a lithographer with Orell Fuessli (Zürich); later he studied in Italy, Greece and Czechoslovakia.He discovered his passion for three-dimensional sculptures after thirty years of painting.

In 1962, Bruno Weber decided to create a great sculpture garden near Zürich, envisaged as a “visionary counterworld”. Inspired by eastern mythology and European folk tales as well as by his own fertile imagination, he used tile, mosaic, concrete, stone, glass and steel to stock his park with a profusion of sinister, comic and melancholic biomorphic creatures and swirling monumental forms.The park, covering 20.000 m² of forest, meadows and lakes, features buildings and colorful monumental sculptures of mythic beasts, like dragons, snakes, birdmen and unicorns.In the middle, he built himself a phantasmagorical house, its facade a writhing profusion of Gothic gargoyles, balcony railings in the form of dragons, nymphs with unicorns, serpents and satyrs — the whole topped by a 25-metre-high tower. Inside, the house featured a dining room with a mosaic labyrinth floor and, for a fireplace, a monster with heat emanating from its nostrils.

Weber took little notice of planning or building regulations and in consequence got into difficulties with the authorities. But his park became so popular with visitors that a truce was eventually agreed. Indeed, in recent years, Weber received a state grant worth millions to help him to create a water garden – on which he was still working at the time of his death.His tireless work was encouraged by his wife Maria Anna, and their daughters Mireille and Rebecca, along with many collaborators who helped him to built this “Gesamkunstwerk”.